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<title>Why you should NOT fall in love with Cleo Wight: An essay by Joseph Hills by PawPunk</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25031743">Why you should NOT fall in love with Cleo Wight: An essay by Joseph Hills</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PawPunk/pseuds/PawPunk'>PawPunk</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hermitcraft RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Mild Sexual Content, Pining, Self-Hatred, Unrequited Love, no but its rlly not made clear, or is it???, unconventional storytelling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 08:22:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>841</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25031743</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PawPunk/pseuds/PawPunk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Basically someone on a discord server I'm on was like "what if when Joe first fell for Cleo he wrote an essay about why he shouldn't do that" and I wrote it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>jleo, joehills/ zombiecleo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>97</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Why you should NOT fall in love with Cleo Wight: An essay by Joseph Hills</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Trigger warnings: read the tags</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It may seem, to the uneducated viewer, that falling in love with Cleo Wight would be a pleasant experience. Especially since you’re already emotionally close so you don’t have to do all that awkward first-date small talk, and you never have to be embarrassed telling her anything because you both already know the worst things about each other. However, as her best friend, I would like to present some arguments as to why it is inadvisable to develop any kind of non-platonic attraction towards Cleo. Not only is it completely unnecessary, but a crush on Cleo will also infect your every waking moment and inevitably ruin your life.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One reason not to fall in love with Cleo Wight is that you should be happy just being her friend. You </span>
  <em>
    <span>were</span>
  </em>
  <span> happy just being her friend, for eight years, so what’s changed? Nothing, that’s what. She’s exactly the same person you’ve been hanging out with for ages with </span>
  <em>
    <span>no problem</span>
  </em>
  <span>. You used to be able to watch a movie with her and focus on the screen, not the square inch of contact her thigh was making with yours. Why would you care now about how her hair falls over her face whenever she’s doing something athletic so she has to brush it out of the way, or how sparkly her eyes are, or the dramatic arch from her hips to her waist back to her ribcage when she lies on her side, when you know her personality? You should be caring about Cleo’s courage, her unabashed weirdness, her fantastic sense of humor, not how hot she is. If you do care about how hot she is its because you’re a creep. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Another reason not to fall in love with Cleo is that once you start thinking about her romantically, you’ll never be able to stop. After all, you went for eight years without falling in love with her even once, but now you can hardly look at her without thinking about how delicate her hands are, how they feel wrapped in yours, how they might feel carding through your hair or caressing your face. (Would her lips be just as soft?) If you let yourself think these thoughts unimpeded, they will continue to get worse until you forget that Cleo is your friend and turn into one of those assholes that only act nice to a girl to get into bed with her. However, if you repress the thoughts you’ll eventually feel less and less attraction to her, and can maintain your friendship.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Some people might say that it makes no sense to try to make your feelings for Cleo go away, because you didn’t choose them in the first place. They may say that its healthier to work through the feelings, and that ignoring them only reduces the possibility of anything actually happening. However, those people are morons. You can get rid of plenty of things you didn’t choose, like your name or your hair color, so why not romantic feelings?  In fact, it is much healthier to not obsess over one person during every waking hour, which you now have more of because thoughts of her keep you up all night. And the possibility of “something happening” is irrelevant, due to the most important reason not to fall in love with Cleo:</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She isn’t going to like you back. Sure, maybe she would in a movie, or a TV show, or some other piece of fictional entertainment media, but in the real world girls with red hair and doe eyes and beautiful voices just don’t date painfully below average guys just because the guy wants them. In real life, pretty girls might be friends with ugly guys but they won’t look at them and get all tight in the throat because they’re so perfect, so stop thinking about it. You have no chance with Cleo, and when you tell her that you’ve been drooling over her like a hyena drools over a piece of meat she’s going to hate you. She’s gonna hate your </span>
  <em>
    <span>guts</span>
  </em>
  <span>, man. Wouldn’t you hate it if some loser you only ever wanted to be friends with professed his undying adoration for you, and society pressured you to return his feelings? Everything would be so awkward, and you’d never recover. You’d throw away eight years of friendship for a sliver of a chance at a kiss. Nothing is worth losing Cleo’s friendship, no matter how much your stupid heart tries to tell you otherwise.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You should not fall in love with Cleo Wight. You should not even humor the idea, not for one second, because it’s not right to think about your friend that way, and because it’s not worth throwing away the perfectly good relationship you have. Even if there was a chance she might like you as more than a friend, you don’t deserve her, not when you look at a complex, worthy, brilliant person and only see green eyes and curves. You shouldn’t fall in love with Cleo because you don’t deserve her.</span>
</p>
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